Funk rock sounding guitar? NO FENDER?

Question

looking for a guitar with a good funk sound, if youre gonna post stuff about fenders dont even bother, i know fenders are good but they are way overused, and the best were made in the 60s and 70s. looking for something more exotic, not something so exotic or w/e like BC rich

Answer 1

Well seeing how you elminated my number one answer, the humble Fender Telecaster cause it's bridge pickup is stunning for funk, I will resort to my second choice, the Gibson Les Paul Special with P-90 pickups.

And many would disagree with your statement about the best being made in the 60s and 70s. CBS almost killed Fender.

Answer 2

it's all in the fingers boy

Answer 3

An American made strat nowdays is an excellent guitar.  There's a reason they are overused, because they're awesome.  Get a gibson or PRS then.  You can play funk on anything.

Answer 4

Well, if you want funky guitar, you gotta go with Prince I think... and he does play Strats and Teles. I'm more partial to the Les Paul sound myself, though currently my only electric is a Line 6 Variax, which can reproduce Strat, Tele, Les Paul, and a mess of other sounds.

Prince also plays a bunch of odd/custom guitars, like the Cloud, and the Model C from Auerswald. He's also used a Honer HG490 for years, and Honer re-issued a look-alike last year, the HTA490.... it's basically a Telecaster clone.

Another one I'd check out is Funkadelic's Eddie Hazel ("Maggot Brain" is a masterpiece), who played Strats, but also Gibsons (Custom Les Paul, Firebird) and Jacksons (not sure which models).

And of course, it's not just the guitars. You need the FX, amps, and speaker cabinets. Fender and Marshalls are pretty standard. For FX, you might want to try out some kind of delay and fuzz pedals, a Crybaby Wah, Boss MT-2 Metal Zone, Digitech Whammy. I get my FX out of a Line 6 FloorPod, I'm not into separate pedals, yet anyway (I'm mostly acoustic, having been messing around with the electric over the last year or so).

Gear only gets you so far... after that, it's practice and maybe innate ability. I figure I'm just way too white to get that funky :-) But I can certainly appreciate it.